


trails of fire (you always knew)

by MagitekUnit05953234



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Anxiety Disorder, M/M, Mentioned Ardyn Izunia, Nightmares, Noctis Lives, Post-Canon, Post-Dawn, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovery, Self-Hatred
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-22
Updated: 2019-12-22
Packaged: 2021-02-26 04:41:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,329
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21897592
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MagitekUnit05953234/pseuds/MagitekUnit05953234
Summary: The thing about Prompto is that it’s impossible to tell when he’s dreaming when he’s asleep, regardless of whether it’s a nightmare or not.
Relationships: Prompto Argentum/Noctis Lucis Caelum
Comments: 6
Kudos: 110





	trails of fire (you always knew)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [darlathecyborgpluviophile](https://archiveofourown.org/users/darlathecyborgpluviophile/gifts).



> Title and end notes borrowed from "Inferno," a song from PROMARE's OST.

Noctis doesn’t sleep near as much as he used to.

At first, it had been cause for concern. People simply aren’t meant to function on two or fewer hours of sleep every single day. After extensive sleep studies and countless trips to the few neurologists who managed to reopen their practices in Lucis, it was determined that Noct was perfectly healthy and was suffering absolutely no ill effects from his chronic sleeplessness. The running theory is that being held in stasis for a decade while absorbing the power of gods changed his physical body enough to where he wasn’t quite in line with the typical human standard anymore. For some people, this would be a dream come true, but Noct really does miss being able to nap through a lazy afternoon if he wanted to.

As a result of Noct’s reduced need for sleep, he has a lot more time on his hands each day than he expects to. He usually spends at least four in bed, two to sleep and another two to just relax beside his husband, who is usually dead to the world for at least six hours out of twenty-four provided nothing gives him cause to wake up.

Lately, he’s been waking up more and more, though. 

The thing about Prompto is that it’s impossible to tell when he’s dreaming when he’s asleep, regardless of whether it’s a nightmare or not. When it is a nightmare —which is growing worryingly common of late— he doesn’t thrash around or cry out in his sleep or wake up screaming. He is quiet through it all. When he wakes, his eyes open and a tremor starts in his shoulders that he tries to stifle. Noct always notices when it happens, but Prompto has a tendency to brush him off and lock himself in the bathroom for a while to ride out what Noct is certain is a panic attack. Prompto never likes showing his emotional vulnerability even after all this time. Even to his husband. 

Tonight, Prompto takes a deep breath as he awakens shortly after three in the morning, the air rattling from his throat as he tips up and forward, planting his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands.

“Prom?” Noct sidles over after extricating himself from his half of the blankets, sitting cross-legged next to his husband, who seems set on condensing himself into as small a space as he can. “Can I…”

“Don’t,” Prompto mumbles it into his palms, his fingertips tightening around his nose, his temples, his cheeks. Hard enough to leave shadowy indents in his skin. “It’s fine. Leave it.”

Prompto sits for a moment, and Noct sits beside him. Neither of them speak until Prompto jerks to life, throwing off his covers and practically leaping from the bed to the floor and starting toward the en suite. Noct is hardly able to react before the door closes and the lock clicks audibly into place. When Noct manages to get out of bed himself, he hears retching from beyond the bathroom door.

This is one of the exceptionally bad nights, then. Usually it would start with the quiet fear in bed, followed by a panic attack hidden behind closed doors. Then Prompto would spend the next day on the floor of the bathroom, refusing to look Noct in the eye or speak more than a few words to him in the one or two times he would come out to retrieve bedding to pile onto the cold tile. The few days like this where Noct had managed a brief touch or eye contact with Prompto, his husband had locked up like he expected to be struck before a full-body shudder spurred him back into returning to his refuge in the en suite as quickly as possible. 

Noct hates days like this. After a few minutes, the entire Royal Suite descends into silence. Noctis waits outside the door in the hope that his husband will feel okay enough to make a reappearance shortly, while Prompto shakes apart in self-imposed solitude. 

☿☿☿

“Prompto?” Noct calls quietly through the door after he watches half an hour tick past on the digital clock on the nightstand. “Are you okay?”

Stupid question.

There’s a faint sound of movement inside the bathroom, and then Prompto’s voice just barely perceptible through the solid wood between them.

“I can’t. I can’t. I can’t, I fucking can’t. Gods, you’re so fucking stupid, you’re still like this. Just get over it, I fucking… I can’t. Stop it, stop it, stop it…”

The empty mirror cabinet opens and then closes, clicking free and thudding shut too fast for someone to even try to look inside. Something else that Noct can’t identify from outside makes a dull clunk before the bathroom door suddenly unlocks and Prompto stands above him, fists clenched and face damp and red.

“Tell me,” Prompto says. He has never initiated conversation himself when like this before, and Noct isn’t sure what to say.

“Tell you what?” Noct eventually settles on, his stomach twisting at the way Prompto’s chin trembles and his breathing stutters.

“Why are you still keeping me around?” Prompto’s hands flutter up to meet at his navel, his right hand toying with the ring adorning his left. “I can’t— I can’t sleep. I can’t eat. I barely even work anymore. What’s the point? What do you get out of this? What—” he breaks off into a coughing fit, his shoulders curling in as he tries to stifle them. Noct stays where he is, yearning to help —to reach out and hold him and let him feel just how loved he is— but knowing that Noct can’t touch Prompto when this is happening for fear of sending him down a spiral that Noct is powerless to stop. “He’s dead. He’s dead and you killed him and I should feel safer with you than anyone but I  _ don’t _ . I can’t. I’m thirty one years old and I’m— just  _ stupid _ . I made it a decade through hell but seeing him once, having him  _ put me to sleep _ made me go back to  _ this _ .”

The fear is looping around to anger now, a familiar dagger Prompto turns to his own neck. Noctis tries to summon up the advice his therapist gave him but his last session with her seems distant and distinctly unhelpful.

“You aren’t stupid,” Noct offers weakly. “What can I do to help?”

“You can’t,” Prompto’s right hand jumps away from his wedding band like he’s been burned. “This is it. This is all that there ever is. Every night. Every night I feel— what is my middle name?”

“I’m sorry?” 

“What is my middle name?” Prompto shuffles backward into the en suite, scrabbling to find the doorknob without looking away from Noct. “What is it?”

“You don’t have one,” Noct says. Prompto had been placed in an out-city orphanage as a baby, and was never given a middle name as is custom among Insomnians. Out-city Lucians and Niflheimians tend to only have a given name and a surname whereas Insomnians and Tenebraens have one or two additional names. It’s been that way for two hundred years or so. There’s a good chance that  _ he _ wouldn’t know that, though. “I asked if you wanted one when we got married. You wouldn’t have had to go through the court process to change your name as long as we declared it on your marriage certificate. You said no.”

Prompto stills almost entirely save for the occasional tremors that continue to rock through him. He swallows, his adam’s apple bobbing. “Why am I still here, Noct?”

“Because I want you to be,” Noct replies, then realizes the possessive sound of it and backtracks. “Because  _ you _ want to be. Because we’re married and everything that I have is yours.”

“You trapped yourself with me.”

“I love you,” Noct pulls himself up from the floor. An ache had slowly been building in his knee and he could no longer ignore it and continue to sit on the carpet like this. He does his best to telegraph each movement before he does anything. “I’m not trapped with you. I’m happy to have you with me as long as you want to be here. Whether you can sleep or eat or work or not, it doesn’t matter. If it mattered, you would have dropped me in high school. Remember when the school called Ignis in our sophomore year because I kept hiding on the roof instead of going to classes after lunch?”

“That’s not the same thing.”

“It doesn’t have to be.”

Prompto’s gaze drops from Noct to his own feet. “You still love me?”

“Of course I do.”

“Even when I… when he… when I still act like this?”

Noct carefully extends a hand. Palm up, fingers loose. An invitation. “As long as you’ll have me, I’m here.”

☿☿☿

“It was him again. In the Keep.”

“Want to talk about it?”

“It was the same one it always is,” Prompto tucks his head under Noct’s chin, pressing himself tighter against Noct’s chest. “I was strung up where you found me. I could barely breathe because the sides of the Y-frame dug into my ribs so bad and I could barely move. I couldn’t feel my hands.”

This isn’t the first time Noct will have heard this and he fears it won’t be the last. He runs his hand through Prompto’s hair, long enough nowadays for the longest strands to touch his shoulders.

“He didn’t bother changing his face. He already knew that I thought you all hated me, probably. It would have been uh… redundant, I guess, to use you guys against me. Lucky for him, I’m scared of pretty much anyone that my body is at the full mercy of. No magic required,” Prompto pauses. He taps at the top of is sternum then draws his hand down his body as he speaks. “You ever have a scalpel run down your chest?”

“No.”

“I have. He threatened to vivisect me, you know. Said he was  _ experienced  _ in it with things like me. Wanted to see if I was any different from them on the inside. Wanted to pull my ribs apart. All I could think of was like… the sound when you crack a walnut. You know what that sounds like?”

Noct can feel Prompto start to shake again, just a little bit. His throat convulses with the beginnings of a cough that he seems to tamp down.

“He could have done anything to me. I couldn’t do a damn thing to stop him. He did— he did whatever he wanted. Just to keep himself entertained. That’s all I really was, you know? I was something to pass the time with and just happened to be pretty useful as bait, too. When I saw him again for real, I thought… soon he’ll be gone. It’s okay, Prompto. He’ll be dead soon. You just have to get through this. And then he put us all to sleep and all I could think about was— I mean, I couldn’t move. I was passing out and I couldn’t move and he was  _ there _ . It was like the Keep again, but worse because I wasn’t even going to be awake for it.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have anything to apologize for,” Prompto yawns. “Just… thanks. I know you’ve heard all this before. Thank you for letting me say it, for what it’s worth. And for staying. Letting me stay.”

“It’s no problem. I want to be here. I want  _ you _ to be here, and what you need to say is important,” Noct takes a quick look at the alarm clock, calculating out how much longer he can linger in bed before he’s expected to be up for his morning meetings. One of the bad things about Ignis knowing Noct barely needs sleep these days is that Noct can’t just  _ happen _ to oversleep whenever he wants to get out of yet another mess of a discussion on the oversaturation of commercial zones in the Calicem District. “You gonna be okay for your appointment today?”   
“I’ll make it,” Prompto grins, a tiny little thing but there nonetheless. Though Noct can’t see it, he can feel the way Prompto’s face shifts where it’s squished against his collarbone. “Guess I’ll have plenty to talk to the doc about this time, huh? Should probably ask about adjusting my meds and seeing if it helps any. Seemed like it was for a bit.”

“Worth a shot.”

The room lightens as dawn breaches the horizon and peeks through the eastern windows of the Royal Suite. Prompto dozes after a while, the tension seeping from him the longer Noct holds him and does nothing  _ but _ hold him. His sleep is disturbed by Noct’s alarm after an hour, and subsequently by Noct apologetically sliding out of bed to get ready for the day, but he doesn’t seem half bothered by the time Noct kisses him goodbye and promises to meet him for lunch in the commons at noon. 

Noctis doesn’t sleep near as much as he used to, but neither does his husband. Neither of them will ever be the exact same as they were the day they left Insomnia behind for the first time in their lives, but that doesn’t mean they’re not getting better. Improvement is a nebulous thing, looping around itself and occasionally seeming to vanish altogether, but with time Prompto begins sleeping through the night multiple days in a row again. Noct gives him space on the days when he hides from his memories in their en suite, and celebrates with a bottle of wine and a mysterious boxed gift —set aside for later with a mischievous wink— when Prompto commits to trying out some freelance photography again while staying on reserve duty with the Guard. They may never be cured of the wounds their journey inflicted, but they’re recovering.

And it’s enough.

**Author's Note:**

> they would carry me home  
> they'd lead me to you


End file.
